This AI tells you if your website is too cluttered

Berlin-based artificial intelligence startup EyeQuant has
developed a tool that will automatically judge how clean the design
of your website is.

The system was developed by teaching a computer to look at
websites in the same way a human might. EyeQuant, founded by a team of
neuroscientists, was building on work it had done on an
Eye-Tracking tool that predicts how people will look at websites to
create an inexpensive heat map. The service provides an inexpensive
alternative to eye-tracking studies and is used by companies such
as Google.

"We believe that the best design is the most simple
design you can come up with"

Fabian
Stelzer, EyeQuant

The Clarity tool was developed using largescale online
experiments with human beings (more than 1,000), who were quizzed
on the cleanness and elegance of different designs. This was
combined with a list of key image features such as colour contrast,
noise, entropy, luminance and contours in a machine learning
process. This allowed EyeQuant to develop a tool that could predict
how clear and organised a design would look to the human eye with
95 percent accuracy.

Users can enter in a URL or an image, and EyeQuant will rate the
Visual Clarity of any design on a scale of 0 (chaos) to 100
(perfect). It also benchmarks results in relation to a Clarity
Index of the 10,000 most visited websites in the world -- Apple's
iPhone online store gets a score of 94, meaning it's in the top one
percent of the most visited sites in terms of clarity. At the lower
end of the scale a cluttered car website called Lingscars.com achieved 0 out
of 100. The average score for the top 10,000 sites is 47, with
fashion sites and simple product sites like Dropbox scoring
particularly highly.

"To have a good prediction like this, you need to have something
that is predictable. With clarity -- how clean and clear is the
design -- intersubjective variance is very low. People agree by and
large about what makes design elements elegant and clean,"
EyeQuant CEO Fabian Stelzer told Wired.co.uk.

The tool is really geared towards ecommerce sites, where you
need to make it as easy as possible for a custom to transact.
Text-based news sites tend to get a low score, since chunks of
words are deemed cluttered. "It was trained with a lot of online
shops," says Stelzer. The algorithm isn't actually looking for
text, it's just looking for image features and pixels. "The way
text is structured, it's picked up as something that oftentimes
corresponds with clutter."

"We believe that the best design is the most simple design you
can come up with. If you unclutter a design and get rid of the
unnecessary parts, you'll have a better website afterwards, hence
you'll have a higher conversion," Stelzer added, saying that people
get impatient and within one click can leave to go to a competitor
site.

But doesn't this mean that all websites will end up looking the
same? Stelzer says this is not the case. "The reason why websites
look like each other is because on one hand companies want to stand
out and be different, but users have certain expectations about
where they should find stuff. 99 times out of 100 you try something
crazy it won't work for users. But every now and then you come up
with something truly cool and this becomes the new standard for
user expectations," he explains. This means that the 1 percent of
"really cool" design might not fare so well according to the
Clarity Index.

However, Stelzer doesn't see the index as being prescriptive,
it's more a tool to help decision making. At the moment all you get
is a score, but the plan is to develop a recommendation tool
suggesting what tweaks could be made to improve upon the
design.

The technology itself was informed by neuroscience. Some of the
team members -- including Dr Peter König and Dr Christof Koch, the
chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science
-- were working on attention prediction models at Caltech in order
to better understand the human visual cortex. They have licensed a
patent and commercialised it through EyeQuant.

EyeQuant is working on a load of other scores along these lines,
one of which is a "beauty" score for websites, but is only asking
western subjects. "There's a lot more intersubjective variance with
beauty. It's definitely tricky, but we have a prototype version,"
says Stelzer. Another score could be trustworthiness -- Stelzer
makes reference to an experiment where subjects were shown portrait
shots of politicians and asked to rate trustworthiness and it
turned out to be a good predictor or success in an election. "It's
both fascinating and scary that people make these important
decisions so easily," he says.

EyeQuant offers subscriptions to its service -- which includes
both the eye-tracking tool and Clarity -- from £199 per month.